The personal blog of Julie R. Enszer, a poet, writer, and lesbian activist. Covering a variety of topics but especially contemporary poetry, LGBT activism, and queer analysis. For more information about her work visit, www.JulieREnszer.com

Monday, August 18, 2008

The Anthropocene Era

(Note: Yes, I am back from Australia. Yes, I am totally whacked by jet lag. Yes, there will be photos, but it is going to take a few days. For now I am posting things that require minimal cerebral activity.)

I heard about this on the radio a few months ago, probably when the London society first reported on it. Now it is appearing in the progressive media. We are living at the dawn of a new era. Let us hope the planet survives to see the next era.

Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.

This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column. Although the idea of the "Anthropocene" -- an Earth epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force -- has been long debated, stratigraphers have refused to acknowledge compelling evidence for its advent.

At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised. This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend ... and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that "the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks." Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.